lisa barone

Recently, Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media wrote a wonderful post about Internet trolls. You know? Those fools who waste their lives trying to make others feel bad so they can feel better about themselves.

Since my websites have grown, I have had an increasing number of jealous trolls posting things in the comments sections of my posts. I’ve also had a few hateful tweets directed my way. They vary from “I can’t believe how you contradict yourself…” to “You are stupid…”

Over time, I have learned to ignore all these. In fact, now I get a huge kick out of deleting or blocking these fools. That’s step 1. Step 2 has been a bit more difficult for me. See, even though I don’t ever respond to these creeps, there is something about their words that stick somewhere in the back of my brain. It then festers there and starts influencing my actions.

A recent example of this happened when I wrote a Lockergnome post titled 10 Awesome Android Apps You Don’t Know About. I knew when I wrote that title that I would get at least one jerk writing me about how they’ve heard about those apps. Still, the post was supposed to be for the non-powerusers who use Android, not the people who load their phone up with 500 apps. With that in mind, I finished the post with the original title and sent it out.

As expected, after an hour I had a few comments where people told me “Idiot! I have 8 out of those 10 apps!” and “Dude, you’re a fag if you think anybody can get anything from this piece of garbage article!”.

These comments, though nasty and came from jerkwads, caused me to second guess myself. I thought, maybe at least there was some truth to what they were saying. Everybody has seen probably seen these apps. I then changed the title to say “10 Awesome Android Apps” then went on about my day. What I didn’t know at the time was the article had already gained quite a bit of popularity on StumbleUpon during the period I had the original title. People were thumbing it up! Since I changed the title though, the permalink for the article got changed as well, and the StumbleUpon users who arrived after the change received a 404 error instead of my glorious words.

Had I stuck with my original gut feeling about the title and not let anybody influence me, many more people would’ve seen and appreciated my post. By the time I changed the title back, StumbleUpon had decided my page didn’t exist anymore.

Once you make up your mind about a post, stick with it, and don’t let the jerks change anything about it. I’m gonna do that from now on and you should too!